Looking back now with disgust of war and all its filthiness and death in our inmost souls, after years of disillusion with the results of that war, with a more complicated knowledge of its causes back in history; with a legacy of debt; unsettled problems; with new causes of hate, revenge, conflict; with justice no longer all on one side, nor injustice, one must still acknowledge the splendour of that spiritual comradeship which made all classes offer themselves for service and sacrifice to the uttermost, which was death. Not in England, nor in France, nor later in the United States, was there any love of this war for war’s sake. It did not appeal to the imagination of youth as a great adventure. Here and there its call might have come as a liberation from dull existence, or as an escape from private tragedy, or as a primitive blood lust. In very rare cases it appealed to old fighting instincts as a better thing than peace. To most it was hateful. Our young men loved life and loathed the thought of death. They did not want to kill or be killed. They disliked military discipline, dirt, lice, the thought of shell-fire, the foreboding of wounds, blindness, mutilation, and horror. They were the heirs of a civilisation in which there had been a high standard of decency, refinement, comfort, and individual liberty. Each young man when he went to the recruiting office knew in his heart that he was saying good-bye, perhaps for ever, to the things and folk he loved, to all familiar decent things, to the joy of life itself. Yet in millions they went, tide after tide ... and the women hid their tears and their agony as best they could, and found out work to do. In great houses and little homes there was the same spirit. Out of the foulest slums as well as out of fine houses came the heroic soul of a people proud of its history, impelled unconsciously by old loyalties which had been stunted but never killed by social injustice.
That was the passion of England and her sister peoples when war began. Difficult to imagine, impossible to feel again—now!... So much has happened since.
The Spirit of France
I remember the mobilisation in Paris on the day before war was declared, and that day. The French people had a different, sharper, more immediate fear. The frontier was in danger. France herself was menaced by the greatest army in the world. In one day, two days, all her life would be at stake. There was a sense of stupefaction among the common people. They too had been taken by surprise by the suddenness of the challenge. And they knew better than the English what war meant in horror and agony. In those crowds among whom I went there were many who remembered 1870—that nightmare of terror and shame and tears. There was no cheering, as when fifty years before the people in Paris had shouted á Berlin! in an ecstasy of war fever. In Paris there was the hush of souls who looked into the face of great death. In the streets men were parting from their women—for the last time. Some wept, not many, after the kiss of eternity. Emotion strangled one’s heart. In those days France seemed to me divine in courage, in sacrifice, in suffering. Anarchists, revolutionists, the scum of the underworld, the poor drabs, were cleansed of all evil, for a time, by love and passion—for France. They themselves did not matter. They held their lives as nothing so that France might live. The Pacifists said: “This is a war to end war.” The Socialists said: “This is a war against militarism.” The old women said: “Our sons will die, but France will be saved.” The young women said: “We give our lovers to France.” From the fields, the workshops and the factories, the manhood of France, quicker than in England, came down to the railways to join their depôts, and for hundreds of miles on the first night of war, in a train taking the first troops to the eastern frontier, I heard on the warm breeze the “Marseillaise,” the song of Liberty and France, and the tramp of marching men, and the rattle of gun waggons; and I felt the spirit of an heroic people like a physical vibration about me. After that come a thousand memories, strangely distant now, like an old dream, of roads black with fugitive people, retreating from the red flame of war; of French and Belgian towns under the first shell-fire, until they fell into flame and ruin; of wounded men, clotted with mud and blood, very quiet, on dirty stretchers, lying in rows under brown blankets, on railway platforms, in improvised hospitals, piled in farm carts, huddled under broken walls, in endless caravans of ambulances; the reek of blood, disinfectants, death; troops on the march, guns going forward, the French cavalry riding on saddle-galled horses, machine-guns in cornfields; troop trains; stations crowded with regiments; fields strewn with dead; women wheeling perambulators with babies and household goods, boys pushing old men along in wheelbarrows, farmcarts laden with children, furniture, grandmothers; the cry reiterated of “Sales Boches!”; the words “C’est la guerre!” repeated as an endless reason for infinite resignation to all this agony, and terror of civilian folk trapped in chaos; the phantasmagoria of war in modern civilisation; and always the courage of women, the valour of men, the immortal spirit of France rising above the torture of its soul and body, while the enemy thrust closer to its heart. In those days—ten years ago—an Englishman in France dedicated his heart to these people....
The Entente Cordiale
And in those days the French people loved the English and their kinsfolk, so that when the first British troops appeared they went mad with joy, as I saw, kissing them, with streaming tears, dancing round them, flinging flowers to them, giving them fruit, as those boys, clean-shaven, bronzed, smart, laughing, singing, “It’s a long, long way to Tipperary,” went forward to be killed, wounded, maimed, blinded, broken, as most of them were before the end came, and some very soon. Vivent les Anglais!... Have the French people forgotten, or have we?
I was in Paris, after wild adventures, with two comrades on a day in September when it seemed that the city was doomed. It was already deserted. At mid-day, between the Place de la Concorde and the Etoile, we saw only one man, and that a policeman on a bicycle. It was no longer the seat of Government. Vast numbers had fled. We had seen them storming the trains. All others sat indoors, with their shutters closed, waiting for the tramp of German soldiers down the streets. The German guns were as close as Chantilly. Only a miracle could save Paris, as we knew, having seen the retreat of a French Army through Amiens, and the stragglers of the British Army after the Retreat from Mons, and the advance of the enemy as far as Beauvais, and a hundred signs of impending tragedy. The sun was glittering on the golden eagles above one of the bridges. The palaces, domes, spires of Paris were clear-cut under a cloudless sky. All the beauty of the city, all its meaning to the world in knowledge and art and history, invaded our hearts. If Paris were taken and France beaten, civilisation itself would be defeated and life would be worthless, and God mocked. It could not happen like that. A miracle must happen first. For God’s sake!
The miracle happened—the miracle of the Marne. The German tide was turned at last. By the blunder of the German Staff, by the audacity of Foch, by Galliéni with his army in taxi-cabs, by the desperate valour of French soldiers, fighting, dying, maddened by thirst, with untended wounds, with rage in their hearts, agonising, but without surrender in their souls because the life of France was in their guard that day. They won a victory which smashed back the German Army and destroyed their plan.
The British Army had a small share in that victory of the Marne. Its weight did not count for much, but its artillery harassed the German retreat with deadly execution, and in fighting down from Mons it had helped to spoil the German time-table and to bar the way to Paris for just that little time which enabled France to stand on its line of battle and repair the dreadful blunders of its first defence.
Have the French forgotten that? It happened ten years ago!